


Ghosts

by Corycides



Category: Almost Human
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 08:19:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1891917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sandra Maldonado has more secrets that even Kennex suspects</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raktajinos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raktajinos/gifts).



Almost Human

 

‘It is past midnight, Chief Maldonado,’ the MX said. ‘Human parameters for optimum health and performance indicate 7.5 hours of sleep are necessary.’

Sandra looked up from her report, registering the grit under her blink for the first time. She rubbed a finger against the corner of her eye, pushing her lid up.

‘I’ll go shortly,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

She wasn’t John. She never saw the point of being rude to the MXs. It didn’t have any impact on them. You might as well just go home and yell at your toaster - at least that wasn’t filed away under ‘emotional responses outside expected parameters’ in the files.

The MX cocked its head and nodded politely. ‘I will see you tomorrow, sir.’

It walked away. Sandra rubbed her eyes again and looked back at the screen. Her eyes had taken advantage of the break to go on strike, refusing to stitch the letters together into any order that made sense. Maybe it was time to go home. 

She closed the computer down and pulled the drawer out, tucking her gun back into its holster and checking that her jacket hung neatly over it. The nudge of it against her hips was a bitter comfort.

There’d been a time…but wasn’t there always?

She dropped the lights as she left the office, her heels clicking against the floor. The ride down to the parking garage was lonely and silent, her reflection staring back from the mirrored walls with tired eyes and a sour mouth.

‘It wouldn’t kill you to smile,’ a ghost voice whispered in her ear. ‘ You’ve such a lovely smile.’

The reflection Sandras blinked slowly. It had been a  long  time since that voice had come whispering in her brain. Logic and five years of coping strategies said it was nothing, that attributing meaning to random events was a tempting error. Screw logic.

She stopped the lift a floor early, getting off in neat grey halls of the admin department. A janitor synth gave her an incurious look as it cleaned around her. After a long, still moment Sandra unholstered her gun and took the stairs down, counting the stairs with each step,

The parking garage was dark and silent, full of the powered down ranks of patrol cars. Sandra’s nerves pinched and jangled, parching her throat. Gun held steady against her thigh, finger laid along the trigger, Sandra padded cautiously between the heavy hunks of metal and plastic, head cocked and wary.

Nothing. The feeling of being ridiculous started to overwhelm her sense of caution. Maybe she should - once in a while - listen to her shrink. She took a deep breath of dank air and let it out, trying to convince her shoulders there was reason to relax.

When she got to her car, there was a heart scraped deep enough into the polyblend spray that the hood had buckled and split.

 

Bony, sharp fingers poked fiercely at the long knots of tension in Sandra’s back, pinching the long, clotted scabs of scar-tissue to wrestle the spasming lumps of muscle into something approaching bearable. The hot burn of lineament stung at the inside of Sandra’s nose and made her eyes water. There were scented oils in the bathroom, lotions and ointments and every ridiculous trend that the rich and cool talked about on screen. Using the rough-cut gym-rub was to make a  point.

Eventually he’d speak up and tell her what it was - and to be honest she liked the sharp aniseed and antiseptic smell.

‘You’re not Kennex,’ Rudy said eventually, voice tight and nasal. His thumb dug under her shoulderblade, working it loose where scar-tissue was binding up around it. 

The accusation was unexpected enough that Sandra looked around. She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘I know.’

His mouth pleated. He was painfully thin, the tendons in his neck and jaw visible under pallid skin. Dust coloured hair hung lank over his forehead.

‘So why are you playing rogue cop in the parking lot?’ he demanded. ‘Captains don’t do that, Captains call for back-up and just take the credit at the end.’

Sandra put her head down on her folded arms, closing her eyes. ‘I thought...I thought I might be imagining it,’ she admitted. ‘I still don’t know why I even thought of him. It’s been years.’

Sympathy smoothed Rudy’s hands on her back and she felt him sigh, the resigned exhalation trembling down his arms and into her shoulders. ‘We should tell Dorian.’

‘Why?’

‘It could be relevant.’

‘It’s not.’

‘If he’s back, if you’re investigating him -’

Sandra wriggled out from under Rudy’s hands and off the table, reaching for the cotton robe tossed over a chair.

‘Internal affairs are in charge of the investigation,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to take a leave of absence until they’re done.’

He raised his eyebrows, mobile face stretching over sharp bones. ‘Are you.’

‘No,’ she admitted, buttoning back a smile. ‘What’s the point? He infiltrated the station - my house hardly has that level of security. What am I meant to do, lock myself in a panic room and have you slide pizzas through the door?’

She reached for her gun. Stopped herself. This was her home. Keeping the gun close, made sense, keeping it in her robe was paranoia.

Rudy swiped his hand over the table, folding it back into the wall. He rubbed his hands together, spreading the last of the rub up over his gangly wrists. ‘Why now? Is it a special anniversary or a-’

‘No. I’ve looked back, tracked every important date on a calendar. Nothing seems to have happened this week back then.’ She twisted her hands up through her hair, lifting it off her neck. ‘I arrested a three bush-league drug pushers and a corporate spy at Majiscon. Nothing worth memorialising.’

‘I guess he disagrees,’ Rudy said. He paused and shrugged. ‘Or you’re lying to me.’

It wasn’t an accusation. Rudy’s feelings were surprisingly iron-clad. He knew he was a weedy geek with spider-fingers and vests - he just thought it was a cool thing to be.

‘Maybe,’ Sandra admitted quietly. She held her hands out. ‘If I was, you know it’s because I’d had to?’

He took her hands and let her pull him in close, wrapping wiry arms around her. It was like being hugged by a collection of rubber bands and pipe stems. 

‘I know,’ he said. ‘If you ever want to tell me the truth, it won’t go any further. I don’t have any friends.’

She laughed against his chest and pulled him down for a kiss, tasting cinnamon and mint mouthwash. His hands slid up, waiting for her murmur of agreement before sliding the robe back off. This time there was nothing clinical about his hands on her.

Afterwards he lay tucked around her, hand laid over her hip. ‘Do you want me to stay tonight?’

Sandra ruffled her hand through his hair. ‘Just don’t eat my plants.’

He snorted. ‘It’s a perfectly good pseudonym.’

  
  


‘Really?’ Sandra asked, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall. ‘ Aphid?’

The boy - his records said 20, he looked too...soft for that age - lifted his chin indignantly. ‘They’re small...’

‘But destructive,’ Dee finished for him, rolling his eyes. ‘We get it.’

Lom sniffed and crossed his arms. He looked less cyber-goth than most of the wannabe hackers they brought in - no photosynth injects or implants. The googles on top of his head and the gaudy three piece suit with clashing pink short looked more...she wasn’t really sure.

‘I don’t have to tell you anything,’ he said. ‘I’m being civic-minded coming here.’

‘You were arrested,’ Sandra said. ‘You’re informing in order to avoid being charged with...what was it again?’

Dee glanced down at his tablet, scrolling through the report with his fingers. He smiled as he looked back up, looking amused. ‘Hacking, aggravated infringement of corporate privacy, blackmail and vandalism.’

‘Vandalisim?’ she repeated, raising her eyebrows at him.

‘He hacked the Mekkia,’ he said. ‘Reprogrammed the vid-screens to flash the CEO’s private information. Including some very private pictures.’

It took biting her lips to stop Sandra from bursting out laughing at that. She absently reached up and rubbed her brooch, fingers tracing the fine lines engraved in the old silver. Lom scowled at her, face scrunching up around his nose.

‘Whenever any form of government because destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,’ he said. ‘Anonymous.’

‘I read,’ she said dryly. ‘I know. And private business...’

He snorted. With that nose it was impressive. ‘The Mekkia board have a monopoly on the anti-cancer gene therapy and Chrome procedures. They own the government.’

Sandra felt the coolness of silver under her fingers again. She pulled her hand away, annoyed at the moment of weakness. Her mother had died in the refugee camps under the wall, a skeleton with stubborn eyes. They had neither money nor papers, so no one had cared what happened to them.

That was none of Lom’s business though. She pulled the chair out, legs scraping over the lino, and sat down.

‘You said you knew who had hacked the trams last month,’ she said. ‘And the sewer plant.’

Lom rubbed his nose and blinked owlishly, the look of a man second-guessing how cool it was to be an informant. He opened his mouth to answer, but the door swung open and the captain strode in.

‘Dorian!’ he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘I need to talk to you.’

Dee raised a dark eyebrow over those pale eyes. ‘Sir?’

‘Nothing bad,’ Hutcherson said, cracking a smile. ‘Kind of an honour actually. Maldonado can handle this.’

Dee shrugged, passed Sandra the tablet and left the room. She set it down absently in front of her, frowning at the door. When she looked back around, Lom was raising wispy eyebrows at her. 

‘So,’ he said. ‘You and him...’

She shut him down, pinned him and winkled the information out of him. Under the blinking fluster, he had a moral compass, a good brain, and the need for a Confidential Informant stipend. He hadn’t seemed that important though - not then.

 

In the middle of the night, Sandra wriggled out of Rudy’s arms and went to sit on the balcony. Perks of position, the closest to a garden she’d ever get. Wrapping her arms around her knees she stared out over the city, wondering if somewhere - out there - he was watching her.

That had been the start of it. Not meeting Rudy - he had been the one good thing to come out of that year - but the Captain’s special project. They’d wanted an ‘ideal’ cop as the model for their new line and Dee had been it.

Not just his face or his hands or those beautiful eyes of his - they’d mapped his brain, copied his tics and twitches and captured his voice. The DRN series was Dee, in every way that anyone from the outside could tell.

Sandra scrubbed a hand through her hair, scraping her fingers over her scalp. It was a non-invasive procedure, all the experts had said, harmless. After the...afterwards, they’d blamed it on the ‘pyschological impact’, the Doppleganger effect. He’d seen too many versions of him walking around and it had triggered a narcissistic psychotic episode.

What was it her psych had told her? ‘His sense of self became dislocated’ and, at this point they always got a little vague, somehow infected the DRNs he had immediate contact with. She stiffened suddenly as the answer occurred to her. 

‘Stupid woman,’ she hissed, jumping to her feet. After all these years, he could still fool her into thinking it was about  her.  That she was the reason he cheated on his girlfriend, that she was the reason he went over the Wall, and that she was the one who brought him back.

Except it never -  never -  had been. It had always been about  him.  It had always been about Dorian, and the mirror-images he saw walking around his city.

She jumped to her feet, brain fizzing with annoyance at herself, and went back inside, scrambling into clean clothes. Rudy woke up long enough to squint at her, knuckling the sleep out of pink-rimmed eyes.

‘It wasn’t an anniversary,’ she said, balancing on one foot as she pulled her heel on. ‘It was the performance review. That petty bastard can’t deal with one of the DRN series being praised.’

Rudy sat up and stretched, joints clicking and popping. He rolled his head and combed his hair back from his face. For such a hyperactive man, he took his time waking up.

‘Are you going to tell Dorian?’

She hesitated. The instinct was to say yes, to show her trust in her men. It seemed a cruel thing to lay on him. That his artifical soul might be his own, but his mind and his habits came from a killer.

'If I have to,' she said. 'I'd rather not though.'

Rudy shrugged, hair flopping back over his face. 'I'll do whatever I can to help,' he said. 'You know that.'


End file.
